The Department of Languages and Cultures (Section Middle East Studies) at Ghent University is looking for a PhD-student to conduct a research on Egyptian artists who left their country for living in Europe and Northern America after 2013. The general aim of the project is to understand how these artists positioned themselves in their new surroundings and towards the situation in Egypt, particularly concerning their art production.

The aim of this meeting is to bring together confirmed and emerging specialists in order to gain some perspective on the current academic research on Ibn ʿArabī and “Akbarī” thought and to discuss research directions for the future. It will also bring to light questions arising from the reading and use of Ibn ʿArabī’s ideas today, taking into account the new approaches and better access to the texts provided by recent tools for textual analysis, and evaluating how our present-day situation shapes our understanding of his works, and conversely, what an informed reading can bring to current re-appropriations and (mis)use.

The literature on pop culture in the Arabian Peninsula is particularly thin. While a rich scholarship has analyzed oral culture and vernacular poetry, less ink was spilled on those forms of culture that use new media, from tape recording to mobile phone aps and from TV production to YouTube. This issue of Arabian Humanities seeks to fill that gap and to analyze pop culture in Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Oman, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain, and Kuwait.

The current issue of Regards will focus on the relations between the arts (cinema, theater, dance, visual arts…) and the body in the Arab societies and, more broadly, in the Mediterranean region. This sensitive subject suffers from prejudgment and prejudice in both audience’s and critics’ minds.

Film industry in the Arab world remains generally underdeveloped. Arab countries still depend on international film support funds, mainly European. This puts Arab producers, scriptwriters and filmmakers in a subaltern position in relation to European producers and funders, whose expectations in terms of content and narrative forms end up strongly impacting the film creation process. On the other hand, margins of freedom and resistance can be created within this system. This conference aims at addressing the complex relation between Arab cinemas and international film support funds.

Among the Near Eastern research programs of interest to Ghent, ULille and UCLouvain universities, the study of religion in the Near East has been chosen as a central theme of a new cooperation project, as several teachers-researchers, doctoral and post-doctoral students are already involved in this field. in 2018, we will start with a masterclass on Hittite religion with Dr Alice Mouton (CNRS - UMR 8167), a well-known scholar of the Hittite world and a specialist of religion in ancient Anatolia, first step to renew the approaches and to develop a reflection of the importance of this subject in ancien Near Eastern societies. Other conferences on the theme of religion in the Ancient Near East and Egypt will be delivered on the same day by other scholars from England, France and Belgium.

This conference would like to engage with one specific context among all those which were and still are, as it were, “affected” by philosophical hermeneutics: the Islamicate context. The latter seems particularly relevant: on the one hand because it is intimately intertwined with the Western context; on the other hand because the Islamicate context retains a clear reference to religion that makes its entanglement with philosophical hermeneutics a burning challenge for all parties involved. The universality of the hermeneutic order should be put to the test of the Islamicate context within three different angles: the exegetical aspect, in order to see in what extend philosophical hermeneutics can contribute to rethink the understanding of the Koran in the contemporary context; the interpretative aspect, to address different contemporary attempts to reinterpret the classical – philosophical, spiritual or legal – heritage; the critical aspect, to present different political and critical issues raised by the question of the encounter between philosophical hermeneutics and Islamic thought.

Many parts of the contemporary Middle East are confronted with war, sectarianism, transnational interferences, uprisings, and a comeback of authoritarian regimes. This brings about various difficulties for ethnographic research as a practice of knowledge production based on the immersion of researchers in given social contexts and the subsequent writing up and publishing of texts. The international conference No country for anthropologists? Contemporary ethnographic research in the Middle East explores the obstacles to do ethnography in the Middle East and take them as the starting point for reflection upon the role of anthropology with a view to the Middle East of today.